Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Mentalist - Recap & Review - Ladies in Red

The Mentalist"Ladies in Red"

Original Air Date: October 21, 2008.

Liz - TwoCents Reviewerliz@thetwocentscorp.com

So, this episode makes a lot more sense the first time around if your mother wasn't humming/whistling the Peter theme from "Peter and the Wolf" every time someone brought it up and thus impeding your ability to hear the dialogue. But I'm going to presume that I was the only one who had that problem. My mom is good but not even she can go into the millions of homes in America this show was viewed in inside of an hour.

1 comment:

So, this episode makes a lot more sense the first time around if your mother wasn't humming/whistling the Peter theme from "Peter and the Wolf" every time someone brought it up and thus impeding your ability to hear the dialogue. But I'm going to presume that I was the only one who had that problem. My mom is good but not even she can go into the millions of homes in America this show was viewed in inside of an hour.

This week we were promised that Patrick has met his match, which seems like a pretty clumsy claim for the fourth episode of the series, but since nobody asked me I'll refrain from further comment. It's true, this week he was confronted with a villain who was a good actress -- better than most -- and for a moment they had me going. Was she innocent, or was the mistress? Were the wife and the mistress working together? No. The wife was playing everyone. Well played, Mrs. Sands, but still not good enough to beat Patrick Jane, who plays the player. Pitting the wife against the mistress was way too easy. Give him a bigger challenge next time, writers!

Naming Mrs. Sands as Patrick's match seems to me like naming that wussy street magician who pilfered your watch on that street corner in New York the match to Houdini. The first is a criminal, and the second is a master who is going to blow your mind. True, she didn't seem like a suspect at first -- although I had her at saying the bassoon was the duck. (Sonia to those of us who grew up with the Sterling Holloway-narrated Disney cartoon! - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILI3s7Wonvg)

We met a CBI higher up, showing that in at least one respect, Patrick Jane does have superiors. Patrick is described as "closing like a fiend," which is true, as we know. It makes me wonder why the rest of the team even still have jobs, although without them the show wouldn't be very interesting. I say this about Patrick as both a person and a character vis a vie the rest of them in the narrative, since I'm pretty sure it's true, but he works best when he has an audience, others to reflect his brilliance. The story almost has to be about someone who marches to his own drummer -- although if you'll excuse me stretching the metaphor, Patrick seems to have his own marching band.

It seems like being a Mentalist is not just asking questions, but knowing which questions to ask. If he had simply asked her, "What instrument represents the duck?" she still had a chance of getting it right. (Maybe not a very good chance, and I don't know many people who would choose oboe off the top of their head if they didn't know it was the right answer, but still.) But by giving her the two choices, the flute and the bassoon, he painted her into a corner because she presumed one or the other was the correct answer. (Although, actually, to correct Patrick -- rather, the writers -- the wolf is French horns and Peter's grandfather is the bassoon.) This question cinched everything, and she got it wrong.

The seduction bet, which I think is required for every show at least once, showed me two things. First, that boys will be boys, and second… well, in Patrick's own words, he took the bet to ensnare the wife, even if he did also want to win the bet. It also looked like it was serving to further UST (again, Unresolved Sexual Tension) between Rigsby and Grace, which was hinted at in the very first episode. I'm not sure how much I like it; when they're trying to put characters together from the very beginning I can't be sure that it's a character-driven decision rather than a writer-driven one. As a storyteller, I like characters to be more organic than some.

Minimal angst for this episode. That kind of bums me out, but I should never be accused of being too nice to my characters -- or anyone else's, for that matter. I hope Simon Baker -- and everyone else, for that matter -- get a chance to showcase his dramatic acting chops. Even though this show is probably strictly considered a drama, I find myself laughing more than I do anything else. Which isn't a bad thing, because I love to laugh, it's just more than I would tend to expect from a show that's touted as a police drama.

So next week's episode is called "Red Brick and Ivy," which all in all sounds more like the decorating scheme of an ivy league school than anything else. Any ideas? How do you feel about Rigsby and Grace, together or apart? Since we've now seen Patrick's so called match, what would it really take to match him? Besides answering that the duck is an oboe, obviously.